Blue Wasp?

I noticed the article in BT today, and I wonder if ya'll have the same wasps I do? They are a very dark iridescent royal blue.

They showed up in my garage about seven years ago. They are not very aggressive - they never touch my sweet tea, and never fly around me when I'm out there doing my ceramics. They actually sometimes seem to just hang out and watch... They appear to live in cracks in walls.

This is kinda unusual, cause most mud daubers and other black, red, and yellow stinger-bearers hunt me out and seem to take great joy in giving me multiple stings! I was wondering if any of ya'll have them too...

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It is so funny you mention this WC. There was something in my truck today that looked exactly like what you described. Not aggressive or loud like a wasp, but it was pretty big. I just "shooed" it out. I don't recall seeing any of these insects till today.

Is this it? It'll make a good avatar for the handle, Blue Wasp, cousin of the Green Hornet. LOL!

If this is it, send $50.00 to my home address and I'll post more info.:-) Just Joking. LOL! Let me know if this is the one. If it is, they're the peach farmers dream...they specialize in attacking and destroying the peach borer...those "things" that ruin the peach crop...You've probably seen their doings every now and then on peaches bought from roadside stands, in particular.

The Blue Mud Wasp is a solitary wasp that is known to take over the abandoned mud nests of the Black and Yellow Mud Dauber (Sceliphron caementarium). Each cell within the nest is stocked with paralyzed a Black Widow spider to feed the developing larvae. Although some people do complain about these wasps, especially since they frequently build their mudden nests near doorways or windows, they are seldom a nuisance. In fact, they are in beneficial. They prey primarily on Black Widow Spiders."

There is a short waisted one called the Cricket Killer too (The adult female kills the cricket, drags it into their long tunnelled home, then lays her eggs in it so the larvae can feed) but mine seem to be very long waisted.

Since I have a preponderance of Black Widows (no panic, they are pretty shy) I am hoping it is the former, anyway! It isn't doing it's job if it kills the peach borer, Canta - I had WAY too many ruined peaches this year!!!

Ahhhh yes Canta.. That is it. Thou I have no peach trees, I do have plenty of pear trees.( anyone want some? I am not a big fan of them and have TONS!!) I have also noticed a few Black Widows hanging around lately. Really is wierd this topic was the 1st thing I saw when I logged on, having just seen it, and wondered WTH is that thing LOL!!

I got bit yesterday by your garden variety wasp. Seems a bunch of them got angry when I sprayed some outdoor clorox on their nest, fancy that. Next time it will be WD-40 and they'll all be dead. Nature, ugh! lol

"Way down deep I'm very superficial" - ALEA IACTA EST - "What we do in life echoes in eternity."

"Behavioral Control Mating disruption is the name of a new strategy that will soon be marketed for borer control." "Small dispensers filled with peachtree borer pheromone are attached to all trees in the orchard, and they cause the atmosphere throughout the area to be filled with the scent of the borer's sex attractant." "Male moths are then unable to locate female moths, mating is prevented, and no fertile eggs are laid." "This strategy is effective only in large (>5 acre) plantings."

LDG...they're quite common around the Midlands and Low Country. A good spot to find them is around the heat pump.

When I lived in Arizona, they were the most common spider around the house and garage. After awhile one can tell by the spider web or egg sacs, if it's made by a Black Widow. Several cans of Raid were always present. :-)

Actually, I love the wildlife over here. I'd never seen a gator in the flesh, or a hummingbird. I hadn't seen a tortoise for years, as there has been an import ban for a long time. People used to put them in a shoe box to hibernate, and not remember until several years later.

It still makes my day if I see a dolphin. If we could just get rid of all the bitey critters, it'd be groovy.

Actually, black widows are not common, but they are here. I'm 72 and I've seen only 4-5 in my lifetime. They like very dark places and build their nest in places like wood or lumber piles. We used to have stacked wood for a fireplace and there would be an occasional black widow down deep in the pile. I would sometimes see one in a lumber pile that had been outside awhile.

I asked a termite inspector, who has to crawl under houses with a crawl space, if he was bothered by spiders. He said he would see one everynow and then, but he left them alone and they had never bothered him.

The few I've seen were not aggressive nor moved very fast. If their nest is disturbed, they get anxious, but one would have to crawl on you to be able to bite. We usually picked up a stick and moved them to the ground where a footstomp would take care of it.

Heron, they're more common around here than people think. They, as you mentioned like dark, damp places...heat pumps, old wood piles, under houses, etc. The reason they are not seen much is they they are usually where people don't frequent too often.

Is pretty much welcome here; web creatures eat other crawly creatures! I have seen many black widows while living here; the kids used to find them all the time. They are shy and more reclusive than the brown recluse! LOL fine by me. If my blue wasps are finding them and stashing them, though, then that means that they are out in the open, there may be too many, so they become simply a part of a cycle.

LDG, I have always been interested in the cycle in Ireland; without snakes, why are they not overrun with rodents and other creatures? (Maybe its because granpa was from the Auld Countree, but I'm curious about Ireland and would love to spend a month there, cycling in the back country.) But I know what you mean - before I came here, I thought I'd seen most every insect and wild critter, but this area has opened up a whole new world of insects - like the large furry ant! About 2 inches long, and red and black striped... never see more than one at a time (lost?) and always very busy...

I don't really know WC. New Zealand also has no snakes, and they do have a problem with the Brushtail Possum, which is a little rat-like fella. Luckily it makes excellent gloves and scarves, so I suppose every cloud has a silver lining.

Ireland is a great place to visit. Once you get out of Dublin it's like stepping back in time.
A few of us went on a fishing trip to Carrick-on-shannon. It poured with rain the whole time. It had been raining for weeks before we got there.
We caught nothing at all out of the lake we found on the first day. It wasn't until the second day that someone noticed a telephone pole sticking up in the middle of the lake. It turned out to be not a lake at all, but a flooded pasture. I wondered why the barman had a wry smile when we told him where we'd been fishing.

The South is full of tiny villages, and I do mean tiny. After a couple of pints in the village pub, I splashed around the corner to buy something to eat from a small shop, and was served by the same chap who was serving the Guinness in the pub!

We used to hunt alligators when we were farming. We had some cattle and hogs as well as truck farming. The gaters were a problem where we had hogs and the small pigs would lie around the edge of a pond. Gaters wouldn't attack a full grown hog, but small pigs were fair game. Since the gators were damaging our "crop", it was legal to dispose of them.

Back then, gators were extremely wary of humans and would sound (dive) at the slightest noise. We had to carefully sneak up to be able to sight the gun. The largest gator we got was 16 feet measured and it took 4 men to get into the back of a truck. One of our employees sold the skin and the steaks from the tail.

We saw a lot of rattlesnakes, especially in ground that had not been plowed in awhile. We had a large 14' harrow with a large tractor to open up these areas and the harrow would turn up large snake beds with dozens of snakes coming out of the nest. Some were about 7 feet long. The harrow killed some of them but many would escape into adjacent woods.

The worst hazard was underground wasp nests. One time, the driver couldn't outrun the wasps on the tractor, so he stopped with the engine running and ran away. I picked him up later and we drove back across the field with the windows rolled up and saw that hundreds of wasps had covered the rubber tires. We decided to let the engine run and went back after dark when all of the wasps would be gone.